THE chief executive of Fermanagh and Omagh District Council has admitted that the local authority is “nowhere near” where it would like to be, in preparing for Brexit due to a lack of information from central government.
At the first meeting of the council’s new Brexit committee in Omagh recently, Brendan Hegarty told the members that whatever work being done by the various government departments ahead of the UK’s exit from the EU was not being shared with them.
Responding to a question from Cllr Jo Deehan, Mr Hegarty said, “Be under no illusions of our internal preparedness. We are nowhere near where we would like to be, but that’s simply because we’re not getting the information.”
Dr Deehan had asked the chief executive whether, in terms of contingency planning, the council were making any distinction between an “orderly exit” or if the UK left the EU with no deal.
She said, “I’m very sorry to say that it seems to me, listening to the debate in Westminster, that there are some hardline Brexiteers who are literally gambling with the livelihoods of many people and with the whole future of these islands.”
Replying to the independent councillor’s concerns, Mr Hegarty said that FODC were working on the assumption that there would be no deal, which he described as the “worst case scenario”.
“Anything better than that’s easier to roll back from, in terms of our planning,” he said.
But the chief executive admitted that, due to the lack of information, the council were still far putting a contingency plan together.
Describing the situation as “wholly unacceptable”, Dr Deehan urged the council chief to use his influence to put pressure on central government to provide the information needed.
After Cllr Sheamus Greene asked what the implications of a ‘no deal’ Brexit would be for waste disposal, the chief executive warned that, if they couldn’t get the material away, then there was only one place it was going to go.
He said, “It’s a retrograde step. You would not want to be spending the money we’re spending encouraging people to recycle but, at the same time, if we can’t get the material away, should that situation arise, there may be no alternative but, on a temporary basis, to put it into landfill.”
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